A study of a largely forgotten optical device and its relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the "black mirror," through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. The Claude Glass is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.

In 1500 CE, the Inca empire covered most of South America's Andean region. The empire's leaders first met Europeans on November 15, 1532, when a large Inca army confronted Francisco Pizarro's band of adventurers in the highland Andean valley of Cajamarca, Peru. At few other times in its history would the Inca royal leadership so aggressively showcase its moral authority and political power. Glittering and truculent, what Europeans witnessed at Inca Cajamarca compels revised understandings of pre-contact Inca visual art, spatial practice, and bodily expression. This book takes a fresh look at the encounter at Cajamarca, using the episode to offer a new, art-historical interpretation of pre-contact Inca culture and power. Adam Herring's study offers close readings of Inca and Andean art in a variety of media: architecture and landscape, geoglyphs, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, featherwork and metalwork. The volume is richly illustrated with over sixty color images.

Originally published in 1949, this book contains a catalogue of the Islamic metalwork that was in the collection of the British Museum at the time of publication. The text is accompanied by a number of photographic reproductions of key pieces and line drawings of some of the intricate designs featured on the artefacts. Basil Gray, in the introduction, argues that 'metalwork provides the most continuous and best-documented material for the history of Islamic art', and as a record of one of the country's most important collections of such art this book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Islamic art.

This book establishes a fresh and expansive view of the grotesque in Western art and culture, from 1500 to the present day. Following the non-linear evolution of the grotesque, Frances S. Connelly analyzes key works, situating them within their immediate social and cultural contexts, as well as their place in the historical tradition. By taking a long historical view, the book reveals the grotesque to be a complex and continuous tradition comprised of several distinct strands: the ornamental, the carnivalesque and caricatural, the traumatic, and the profound. The book articulates a model for understanding the grotesque as a rupture of cultural boundaries that compromises and contradicts accepted realities. Connelly demonstrates that the grotesque is more than a style, genre, or subject; it is a cultural phenomenon engaging the central concerns of the humanistic debate today. Hybrid, ambivalent, and changeful, the grotesque is a shaping force in the modern era.

In A Revolutionary Artist of Tibet author David Jackson focuses on the Khyenri style, the least known among the three major painting styles of Tibet, dating from the mid-fifteenth through the seventeenth century. The painting of Khyentse Chenmo, the founder of the Khyenri style who flourished from the 1450s to the 1490s, was significant for his radical rejection of the prevailing, classic Indic (especially Nepalese-inspired) styles with formal red backgrounds, enthusiastically replacing them with the intense greens and blues of Chinese landscapes. Khyentse was famed for his fine and realistic looking work, both as a painter and sculptor. His painting style has often been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars-sometimes misidentified as an early example of the Karma Gardri style - but it is a missing link in the history of Tibetan painting. The Khyenri style is now most closely linked with a small sub-school of the Sakya tradition, the Gongkarwa. The most important in-situ murals of the Khyenri style survive at the Gongkar Monastery in southern Tibet, south of Lhasa near the Gongkar airport. There we find murals by the hand of Khyentse Chenmo himself; many of them were covered by a layer of whitewash and thus escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Jackson also brings to light several of Khyentse's paintings in museums outside Tibet, including some that have been unrecognized for over a century.

This is the first colouring book in the "Northwest Native Arts" series. You can learn about some of the real and legendary creatures revered by the natives of the west coast by using these templates to create spectacular pictures.

Ending centuries of isolation, the Meiji era opened Japan to the world in the late nineteenth century, revealing a rich and sophisticated culture. Largely unknown until then, it proved an object of fascination to the West, and the delicacy of its art inspired such figures as Van Gogh, Manet, Whistler and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. French painter Felix Elie Regamey (1844 1907) was one of the few Europeans who had travelled to Japan, and his deep respect and understanding of the country's art and customs soon established him as an expert. Appearing first in French in 1891, his observations were published in this English translation in 1893. Offering an artist's perspective on Japan and its mores, it also contains 100 illustrations drawn by the author using Japanese techniques. Readers will find much of interest in this valuable contribution to the study of Japanese culture.

Originally published in 1938, this book provides a history of the variety of forms of Buddhist art that grew up in Thailand from the 1st century AD to the end of the 16th century. Le May draws on his experience as part of the British Consular Service in Thailand to focus primarily on sculpture, how the trade routes in South and South-East Asia brought Thailand into contact with a variety of artistic styles and how the different areas of the country adapted these styles for their own use. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of Thai art specifically or of Eastern art more generally.

This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties). Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politicians to the discussion of the bijin and to the production of a national discourse on standards of Japanese beauty and art. As Japan worked to establish its place in the world, it actively presented itself as an artistic nation based on these ideals of feminine beauty. The book explores this exemplary figure for modern Japanese aesthetics and analyzes how the deceptively ordinary image of the beautiful Japanese woman-an iconic image that persists to this day-was cultivated as a "national treasure," synonymous with Japanese culture.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed-from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda-the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In this 2002 book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment.

Zhao Wenbing provides an accessible, illustrated introduction to the sculptural art of China, including the magnificent Terracotta Army, Buddhist sculpture, tomb carvings, architectural sculpture, exchange with foreign cultures and Chinese sculpture today. Chinese Sculpture takes the reader through the unique aesthetic features of sculpture in China, arguing that the evolution of this sculpture parallels the development of Chinese culture through history.

This practical and supremely useful manual is the first comprehensive, hands-on introduction to Japanese ceramics. The Japanese ceramics tradition is without compare in its technical and stylistic diversity, its expressive content, and the level of appreciation it enjoys, both in Japan and around the world. "Inside Japanese Ceramics "focuses on tools, materials, and procedures, and how all of these have influenced the way traditional Japanese ceramics look and feel. A true primer, it concentrates on the basics: setting up a workshop, pot-forming techniques, decoration, glazes, and kilns and firing. It introduces the major methods and styles that are taught in most Japanese workshops, including several representative and well-known wares: Bizen, Mino, Karatsu, Hagi, and Kyoto.
While presenting the time-tested techniques of the tradition, author Richard L. Wilson also accommodates modern technologies and materials as appropriate. Wilson has gathered a wealth of information on two fronts--as a researcher of Japanese pottery and art history, and as a potter who has studied and worked for years with master Japanese potters. In his introduction, he provides a short history of Japanese ceramics, and in closing he looks beyond traditional methods toward ways in which Western potters can make Japanese methods their own. Richly illustrated with 24 color plates, over 100 black-and-white photographs, and over 70 instructive line-drawings, "Inside Japanese Ceramics "is indispensable for potters as well as connoisseurs and collectors of Japanese ceramics. Above all, it is an invitation to participate--to study, make, touch, and use the exquisite products of the Japanese ceramic tradition.

Han Jiantang provides an accessible, illustrated introduction to the fascinating history and development of the written Chinese language, from pictograms painted on rocks and pottery and ancient inscriptions to the refined art of calligraphy and the characters in use today. Chinese Characters will appeal to readers looking for an introduction to the rich but complex Chinese language and to all those interested in the relationship between language and culture.

Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy, art theory, and many engrossing examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, sex, web sites, and research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, lively book will engage the public, introductory students, and teachers in the arts.

Traditional Chinese painting was fundamentally an abstract art form. Artists did not seek to represent direct copies of the natural world; rather, traditional Chinese paintings sought to portray the harmony between the natural world and human emotion, evoking ancient Chinese philosophy. From ancient scroll paintings to Buddhist grottoes to modern art, Lin Ci explores the history, theory and development of distinctive styles of Chinese painting, illustrated throughout with full color examples of these unique, treasured works of art.

This compelling account of collaboration in the genre of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) offers a new approach to understanding the production and reception of print culture in early modern Japan. It provides a corrective to the perception that the ukiyo-e tradition was the product of the creative talents of individual artists, revealing instead the many identities that made and disseminated printed work. Julie Nelson Davis demonstrates by way of examples from the later eighteenth century that this popular genre was the result of an exchange among publishers, designers, writers, carvers, printers, patrons, buyers, and readers. By recasting these works as examples of a network of commercial and artistic cooperation, she off ers a nuanced view of the complexity of this tradition and expands our understanding of the dynamic processes of production, reception, and intention in fl oating world print culture. Four case studies give evidence of what constituted modes of collaboration among artistic producers in the period. In each case Davis explores a different configuration of collaboration: that between a teacher and a student, two painters and their publishers, a designer and a publisher, and a writer and an illustrator. Each investigates a mode of partnership through a single work: a specially commissioned print, a lavishly illustrated album, a printed handscroll, and an inexpensive illustrated novel. These case studies explore the diversity of printed things in the period ranging from expensive works made for a select circle of connoisseurs to those meant to be sold at a modest price to a large audience. They take up familiar subjects from the floating world - connoisseurship, beauty, sex, and humor - and explore multiple dimensions of inquiry vital to that dynamic culture: the status of art, the evaluation of beauty, the representation of sexuality, and the tension between mind and body. Where earlier studies of woodblock prints have tended to focus on the individual artist, Partners in Print takes the subject a major step forward to a richer picture of the creative process. Placing these works in their period context not only revealsan aesthetic network responsive to and shaped by the desires of consumers in a specific place and time, but also contributes to a larger discussion about the role of art and the place of the material text in the early modern world.

Alfred C. Haddon began his study of these native fabrics and garments with the collection in the Sarawak museum, Kuching, of which many of the patterns had been identified. His own collection, supplemented by one purchased for him from Dr Charles Hose, is now in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. These sources, together with an examination of the cloths in the British Museum, formed the basis of this memoir, which was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1936. This was the first time that the beautiful and intimate patterns of Iban textiles had been investigated and illustrated. Laura E. Start contributed a full technical description of the manufacture of the fabrics and provided all the drawings.